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TO WOMEN ENGAGED IN 

Ctjurcf) toork. 



flIGHT REVEREND THE BISHOP OF NEW YORK. 



* 



NEW YORK : 

Published fob the Chubch Wobk Association 

by 

E. P. DUTTON & 00. 

1887. 



INTRODUCTORY NOTE. 



The Addresses which follow need, rather 
than an introduction, an apology. Of their 
crudeness and imperfection no one can be 
half so sensible as he who now sees them 
in the cold light of print. Prepared amid 
the pressure of large and anxious tasks, away 
from books, and without leisure for reflec- 
tion; wholly unwritten, save as to a few 
brief heads, and delivered, usually, without 
a single note, they have been taken down by 
a short-hand reporter, and appear here with 
all their original defects of form, and diffu- 
siveness of style. I wish I could believe 
that the judgment of others, who have asked 
for them in this more permanent form, were 
not more friendly than critical, and I can 
only pray that, if they shall be found to con- 
tain a single helpful suggestion, it may be 
accepted as at least partially excusing the 
temerity of their publication. 

Henry C. Potter, 

Lent, 1887. 



<ftf)e t&xtat Exemplar, 

An Address delivered in Grace Church, New 
York, on Tuesday, November 27, 1883, at the Ser- 
vice for Women engaged in Church work. 



THE GREAT EXEMPLAR. 



It is a matter of heartfelt thankfulness 
to me that I am permitted to meet you 
here to-day. We shall be stronger, I 
am sure, for our common tasks — for in 
a very real sense yours and mine are 
one — for looking into one another's faces, 
and recognizing that closest bond which 
binds us together in service to our com- 
mon Lord. Such a gathering as this helps 
us to make our communion of service a 
more real and inspiring fact, and to remind 
us that, however far apart may lie our vari- 
ous fields of work, the work is one, and the 
workers one, in the motive and the Master 
that inspire them. 

Our communion of service, I say, and 
that it is a communion of service that 
associates us we may not venture to forget. 
There is a line of reflection which would 
seem, at the first view, to be that which, 
most of all, is appropriate to this occasion. 
In our various relations to those societies, 



8 

guilds, sisterhoods and the like, which are 
represented here, we are much engrossed of 
necessity in the tasks to be done and the 
ends to be accomplished. In each of these 
there is much detail, much that is of the 
nature of earthly business, much that is 
concerned with material means and re- 
sources. And, busy about these— absorbed 
with questions of finance or charitable 
house-keeping, buying clothing, or packing 
a box for a missionary, dressing a wound, 
dispensing an alms, or washing some poor 
waif of the garret or the street into some- 
thing like outer whiteness, if no more, it 
may be said that we are easily tempted to 
forget the higher ends of all Christian 
work, to forget that " the life is more than 
meat and the body than raiment " — to for- 
get that our service itself is, or should be, a 
nurture of our own souls in the life of prayer 
and faith, and saintly speech and thoughts, 
and instead, like her whom her Lord gently 
but distinctly admonished, to be " cum- 
bered with much serving." 

Believe me, I do not forget it. That other 
side of a Christian life which is not work 
but worship, not activity but stillness and 
upward looking expectation, not contact 
with men but communion with God, we 



are all in danger of neglecting. Even the 
highest and most sacred functions (none 
knows it better than he who addresses you) 
may be in danger of becoming a mechanical 
and task-work routine, and if any one of us 
is to be saved from that perfunctory and 
secular temper which se^s in our service 
only an engagement to be kept, so much, 
piece-work to be finished when it is called 
for, it must be by coming back, from time 
to time, into those upper airs where the 
soul may hearken and be still. 

But while this peril is to be distinctly 
recognized, there is another as real, and 
often more dangerous, because less easily 
discovered. History has been written in 
vain, if it has not taught us that nothing is 
easier than to antagonize the life of devotion 
and the life of service, and to exalt the 
former as more sacred and more needful 
than the latter. That legend of the kneel- 
ing monk in his cell, to whom, as he prays, 
there comes a vision of his Lord flashing 
out upon the bare, white wall of his cham- 
ber, and looking down upon him with in- 
effable tenderness and benignity, was writ- 
ten for all time. He is kneeling, you will 
recollect, and gazing upon the vision with 
wrapt devotion, when the harsh clang of 



10 

the bell at the monastery- gate breaks upon 
his ears. He knows well enough what it 
means. A stranger, belated, needy, and im- 
portunate, is knocking for admission. Shall 
he go and let him in, or stay? Shall he miss 
the vision, or the service ? And while he 
hesitates the bell rings again, and regretfully 
remembering his vow not to be heedless of 
the cry of any poor man, he hastens to obey 
its summons, renders the needed service, 
and returns sadly to his cell. The vision, 
he is sure, will be ended, and the Gracious 
Presence gone. But no ; it shines down 
upon him in fuller, nearer beauty, and as 
he looks he hears a voice, " If thou hadst 
staid, I had fled." 

The parable is of eternal application. The 
Church has had in all ages the quietist as 
well as the busy-body, the pietist and the 
mystic as well as the philanthropist and the 
secularist. How many sermons have we 
heard about the sisters, Mary and Martha — 
sermons which, with all their eloquence, 
missed the point of their story, and mis- 
read the words of their Lord. For it was 
not that Martha toiled that her Master re- 
buked her, but that she toiled at the wrong 
time and for a wrong end. Who knows at 
what tasks Mary had wrought early and 



11 

effectively, that, when the Guest came, she 
might be free for that truer hospitality 
which consists not in fussiness, but in com- 
panionship? Nay, who does not know that 
hers was the truer serving which waited 
upon her Lord ? 

" Ye servants of the Lord, 

Each in your office, wait, 
Observant of His heavenly word, 

And watchful at His gate. 

sj« * * # * * 

" Watch, 'tis your Lord's command, 
And while we speak He's near ; 

Mark the first signal of His hand, 
And ready, all appear." 

So runs the Ember hymn, and we may 
not miss its meaning. Service and devotion 
are not the antagonists of each other. 
Rightly viewed they are parts of one sym- 
metrical whole, a life in which the one in- 
terpenetrates the other, and in which the 
hearkening ear and the watchful eye are 
sometimes as true a service, as real a work 
for God and our fellow-men, as the busiest 
task and the most exhausting labors. A 
student of nature is strolling through a field, 
and the laborer who watches him idly pass- 
ing by, sighs in envy of his indolent and 
easy life. But in truth that observant eye, 



12 

those trained powers of discrimination and 
discovery, are taking in the minutest details 
of his surroundings, and deducing from 
them principles which, in their application, 
shall make the laborer's task lighter, and 
all the world richer. A commander is 
moving to and fro, absorbed and silent, 
upon his quarter-deck ; and the man at the 
mast-head looks down upon him with a 
vexing sense of the contrast between his 
own hard and exposed life and that other 
which seems so much easier. But we know 
which of the two is even then the more 
laborious, which brain and eye and ear are 
on the keener and more constant tension ; 
in one word, who is the toiler at once 
the more constant and the more indefatig- 
able. 

And all this is of value only as it leads us 
into the presence of the Great Exemplar. 
What was the story of the earthly ministry 
of Christ? There is a little volume by a 
non-conformist divine of England,* called 
" A Day with Christ." I wish we might 
all read it. It is simply the story of a sin- 
gle day's work by the Worker of Nazareth, 
as told in the Gospels, and it is safe to 
assume that it is a specimen of the greater 

* The Rev. Samuel Cox. 



13 

part of His brief and crowded ministry, 
may not rehearse it here, but I may remind 
you how few, after all, were the pauses in 
that ministry. Undoubtedly Christ had His 
moments of stillness. But if the story of 
the Gospels is to be believed, how brief 
they were ! How He hastens, unrestingly, 
from town to town ! How no privacy of 
friend's house, or entertainer's guest-table 
protects Him from the sinners and sufferers 
who throng to touch and hear Him ! And 
yet, shot through and through, was all this 
service with the silver thread of a Divine 
calmness and peace. His tasks never flurry 
Him, His work never masters Him, His 
engagements never enslave Him. On the 
most urgent errands, He yet turns aside 
and interrupts them. In the most tragic 
moments (think of the servant of the High 
Priest whose ear Peter cut off) He turns to 
heal and restore ! 

Now, when we look at such a life as this, 
we find ourselves asking, "What was its 
supreme spring and spell?" If you will 
turn to the fifth chapter of St. John's Gos- 
pel, and look at the 17th verse, I think you 
will find it. Says Jesus: "My Father 
worketh hitherto, and I work." Hold these 
words in your thoughts for a few moments, 



14 

and, meantime, go along with me in the 
next step of our meditation. 

We sometimes think of the work of Christ 
in the world as if, in its human experiences, 
it was somehow wholly different from our 
own. But it was not. What are our com- 
monest experiences in our work — common- 
est and most disheartening ? 

(a) Weariness, I think you will agree with 
me, is one of them. With vigorous powers, 
and light heart, and facile hand, service is a 
challenge which we gladly and almost ex- 
ultantly accept. But the day comes—per- 
haps, with some of us it has never been ab- 
sent — when the brain is dull, and the hands 
tired, and the nerves jarred, and sore, and 
shrinking. And then we say : " There was 
One who could say, ' My meat is to do the 
will of Him that sent Me ; ' but if He could 
say that, how different He must have been 
from me. My spirit is willing, but oh, my 
flesh is very weak — yes, and weary. Could 
He ever have known anything like this ? " 
Listen, my sister. 

"And He must needs go through Samaria. 
Then cometh He to a city . . called 
Sychar. . . . Now, Jacob's well was 
there. Jesus, therefore, being wearied with 
His journey, sat thus on the well." Did you 



15 

ever think of the force of that little word 
"thus"? Being wearied, He sat "thus" 
How vivid and masterly the touch that, in 
this way, lets us see the whole scene. Jesus 
was wearied, and He showed it. He sat 
thus — that is, as one who is wearied, with 
the droop of fatigue, and the languor of 
exhaustion, on the well. Tired ? Ah ! yes. 
He knew what it was to be tired, and to 
find the frail instrument falter before its 
mighty tasks. Your experience is not unlike 
His. Into the valley of that humiliation, if 
it be a humiliation, He has gone before you I 
(b) Again : another experience common 
to all of us in work for Christ is that dis- 
couragement outside of ourselves, which we 
find in the stubbornness of that with which 
our work is concerned. Who shall estimate 
the enthusiasms dampened, the lofty pur- 
poses abandoned, the large and noble plans 
left unfulfilled, because, when we addressed 
ourselves to our task, we found circum- 
stances so unyielding, the hearts of men so 
obdurate, the sympathies of Christian disci- 
ples so cold and irresponsive, the leaders in 
Israel, even, to whom we had so confidently 
turned, indifferent or suspicious ? There 
are those here this morning — I know it, 
though they have never told me so — who 



16 

have said to themselves, " What was the 
good of it all ? my sacrifices, my prayers, 
my plans ? I had an opportunity ; I gladly 
owned the call that came to me in some 
providential opening; I was willing to spend 
and be spent for Christ. And what did I 
meet ? From those to whom I went, in my 
Master's name, and with His message, a 
chilling and repellent welcome, or worse 
still, a sneer and a gibe. From those who 
were rich in this world's goods, a dole or a 
refusal. From my fellow-servants in the 
same household of Faith, a prophecy of my 
failure, or a jest at my fanaticism. I have 
been willing to work for Christ, but I have 
found neither welcome nor help, and I am 
simply discouraged, and what is worse, 
half faithless of good or of any triumph of 
the Truth." 

There is no exaggeration, I believe, in 
such a picture as that ; and yet its shadows 
are not half so dark as those of that age of 
the world to which Christ came. It is the 
pre-eminent distinction of His ministry that 
the Church and the priesthood, the scholars 
and the cultivated, the wealthy and the emi- 
nent, each one of them, as a class, opposed 
to Him a blank, dead wall of stubborn in- 
difference. It was not that they could not 



17 

understand Him ; they did not want to. 
" Ye will not believe My word," this was 
what He said of them, and He spoke that 
which He knew. The obstacle to His wel- 
come was in the will — obstinate, antagonis- 
tic, unbelieving. And yet, in the end, He 
triumphed. There came a day when they 
who had mocked Him yielded, and when 
4 'a great company of the priests were obe- 
dient to the faith." There came a day 
when the Cross conquered pride, when love 
melted resistance, when the truth took 'cap- 
tive the soul. 

My sisters, you are working with the 
same Cross as your symbol, and with the 
same truth as your inheritance. Hold them 
up with hands nerved by faith, and with 
hearts on fire with love, and God will give 
you your hire ! 

(c) Once more, and as illustrative of 
other experiences common, I imagine, to all 
of us, there is that discouragement which 
comes to us not from opposition, nor yet 
from weariness, but from those who are our 
fellow-workers. You have a purpose, lofty 
and helpful, as you are persuaded, and 
those who are associated with you cannot 
see its merit. It is not that they are indif- 
ferent — you know that they are not ; it is 



18 

not that the j distrust you — you are sure of 
their regard ; but their eyes are holden that 
they cannot see. Some film of prejudice, 
or, of tener still, some intellectual incapacity 
to understand you (one of the hardest things, 
I think, to bear) makes it simply impossible 
for them to follow your thought or to enter 
into it. It is not hostility, it is simple dul- 
ness. Or again, it may be that they do 
comprehend you, but they are honestly at 
issue, with you. ''Far be it from Thee, 
Lord," says St. Peter, when his Master fore- 
tells His death. The Apostle knew what his 
Lord proposed, and he honestly doubted its 
expediency. And to the companionship of 
such men Christ was doomed, as we should 
say, during His whole earthly ministry. It 
would be simple trifling with the facts to 
pretend that they understood Him, even at 
the Last Supper, or that they were riot hon- 
estly at issue with Him as to the expediency 
of His purpose. 

And yet, He waited— and wrought. The 
work did not cease because His fellow- 
workers could not comprehend it. Toiling 
and suffering, dying and rising again, He 
who said "I must work, the night cometh," 
went on in that work till the end, that glo- 
rious end, when it came to be with all, as at 



19 

first it was with two of them, that " their 
eyes were opened and they knew Him " ! 
Kneel down, then, O discouraged one, and 
when even your nearest and dearest in the 
Lord cannot comprehend you, trace His 
lonely footsteps in the way, and strive your- 
self to walk in them. 

But how ? In such a life there was some 
mighty and sustaining power . What was 
it, and how can we make it ours ? To that 
question we have, I believe, the answer in 
those words which I have quoted in St. 
John's Gospel : " My Father worketh hith- 
erto, and I work." Sit down and read the 
words of Christ in the four Gospels, and see 
how full they are of the sense of God — God 
working in nature (" Behold the lilies," 
" He maketh His sun to rise," " He sendeth 
rain," etc.) ; in events, as He turns back for 
Israel the half-forgotten page of Hebrew 
history and traces through its tangled skein 
the golden thread of a providential order- 
ing ; and finally, in Himself, as when He 
says "I and My Father are one;" "The 
work that I do, I do in My Father's Name;" 
" The Father loveth the Son, and sheweth 
Him all things that Himself doeth." In 
the ministry of Christ there is an all-per- 
vading consciousness of a Divine partner- 



20 

ship, and, flowing out of it, a calm and 
serene confidence that He who was working 
in and with Him, would bring Him, let 
what might delay or hinder, to the hour 
when, His task complete, His toil all done 
and ended, He could say, " I have finished 
the work which Thou gavest Me to do." 

That was His secret. It must be ours ; 
and it may be. One with Him in the fellow- 
ship of the Father, confident with his confi- 
dence who had caught so truly the spirit of 
his Lord that he could say, " Beloved, now 
are we the sons of God,"' and with that 
other who wrote " We then as workers to- 
gether with Him, beseech you," we too may 
not fear to say " My Father worketh hith- 
erto, and I work." His lamp shines through 
my reason. His compassion stirs my pity. 
His courage nerves my will. My task, my 
work, do I call it ? Nay it is His more than 
it is mine. He and He only can make me 
know the meaning of the words : "Jean 
do all things through Christ which strength- 
eneth me," and He has given me "an Ex- 
ample that I should follow His steps." 



* 



&f)e Eealnt of €)roer. 

An Address delivered in St. Ann's Church, New 
York, on Monday, February 1, 1886, at the Service 
for Women engaged in Church work. 



THE REALM OF ORDER. 



I am to speak to you this morning, in ac- 
cordance with the notice already given to 
you, of the Eealm of Order; and in refer- 
ring to the large subject which that phrase 
suggests to us, we may w r ell remind our- 
selves at the outset, how we who live in the 
world of to-day, and who call ourselves 
Christian people, are a part of those two 
great realms or kingdoms, each one of 
which has so much to do with our happi- 
ness and welfare. 

We are a part, first of all, of the Realm 
or Kingdom of Nature. The eye with which 
I look into your faces at this moment, the 
ear with which you hear my voice, the feet 
which have brought you hither, the brain 
which has followed these services so far — 
all these- are a part of the great realm, the 
first stone of which was laid when "In the 
beginning God created the heaven and the 
earth." And when, after a long rest, that 
creation was followed by those successive 



24 

fiats or commands, which called light and 
the lower forms of vegetation and animal 
life into being, and which crowned the 
whole with the existence and the powers 
and the sovereignty of man, this was the 
inauguration of the Eealm of Order. 

Believe, if you choose — for I think that 
a larger study will adequately reconcile the 
two seemingly opposite views of the sub- 
ject — that these successive steps of crea- 
tion were accomplished in some sort or 
other, by a progress or development of life 
from lower forms into higher; nevertheless, 
the meaning of what we know as nature to 
us here to-day is one and the same. Once 
there was chaos, darkness, seething forces 
which had not been called into organized 
life, and had not been placed in fixed rela- 
tion to other forces ; and then, as we should 
say, one day, there came a Voice. He who 
is Himself a God, as the Apostle names 
Him, " not of confusion," but of order and 
of " peace," because of order in all the ages, 
spoke at last, and this chaos vanished, and 
the darkness disappeared, that in the place 
of it there might appear that thing which 
we know as the Realm of Order. 

Think, for one moment, of one single 
feature of that realm, as illustrative of 



25 

the whole. Think of the law that parts 
day from night, and makes the succes- 
sion of darkness and light. Suppose, if 
so impossible a thing were supposable, 
that, instead of the recurrence of daylight 
and darkness, in accordance with a law 
of fixed and sure succession, by which you 
can tell just as accurately when the sun will 
rise a year from to-day, as to morrow — you 
and I were left to the uncertainties of a 
vagrant daylight and a vagrant darkness ; 
a life in which day and night alternated 
irregularly, spasmodically, without a law, 
and without any premonition or foreknowl- 
edge on our part. Think what it would be 
to undertake to order your daily life, to 
minister in the things in which ministry is 
meted to you, if, first of all, you could not 
place your hand upon a law of order in the 
realm of nature, and say, "This thing will 
be, because it has been, and on this fixed 
and orderly succession, on this due and har- 
monious proportion, of day and of night, I 
may count in the work that I have to do in 
the world." 

What now was proclaimed on the first 
morning when the sun dawned for the first 
time on the world, and when chaos van- 
ished to give place to order and to those 



2a 

great laws of Dature and of life of which 
you and I are a part ? This : that the world 
was to be the home of a creature who was 
to find in it a Eealm of Order. 

And again ; what was proclaimed, when, 
centuries afterwards, another kingdom came 
into being as the Church of the Lord Jesus 
Christ? One day, a far-off land is roused 
from its lethargy by a cry. There is a voice 
heard in the wilderness ; there is a solitary 
man, a single personality, lifting up a pro- 
test against the sins, the lethargy, the dark- 
ness, the subterfuges of the time. And that 
is all at first ; because in the world of 
humanity the first thing is not organized 
society, but the individual ; first of all, that 
separate and sacred personality which in 
the eye of God is the image of His own 
being, and the likeness of Himself. And 
so, first of all, there is John the Baptist ; 
not a church ; not a society ; not a commu- 
nity or fellowship of any sort; but one man, 
setting himself against the drift of his time, 
kindling other men into life and light and 
fire, by the power with which he speaks. 
And this is a perfect illustration — the min- 
istry of this man John the Baptist — of what 
we may call at once the power and the 
weakness of individualism in the world. 



27 

For, following the ministry of John the 
Baptist, we find that, when the Apostles 
came on one occasion to Ephesus, there 
were those who had been baptized with the 
baptism of John, and who had not so much 
as heard whether there was any Holy Ghost. 
They had been set on fire by a new truth, 
and then they had wandered apparently out 
of the influence of that which followed the 
preaching of John the Baptist; they had 
not been brought into the associations of the 
Church of Christ ; they had not been bap- 
tized in the Name of its Divine Founder, 
and they were outside the means of grace, 
and therefore necessarily largely outside the 
hope of salvation. 

But after John the Baptist there comes 
Another, who from first to last reveals Him- 
self as the Prophet, Teacher, Founder and 
Ordainer of order. He speaks of a King- 
dom, of His disciples as the children of a 
King. Little by little, taking up that in- 
terest and curiosity and alarm which had 
been awakened by His predecessor, He lifts 
it to a higher level, to something more than 
curiosity, or interest, or alarm, to that which 
we name discipleslrijx; and when He has 
gathered about Him a little band of men 
infused with His own spirit and converted 



28 

to His own convictions, what does He do 
but send these men out to baptize in the 
Name of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. And 
thus was organized a Divine Society, to 
create in the world a brotherhood which 
should be ruled according to the principles 
of a divine order, and to lay the broad 
foundations of that great fellowship or 
Kingdom which we name to-day as the 
Church of God. 

Now, when you come to read the letters 
which the men whom Christ sent out to 
preach His Gospel, wrote to the Churches 
which they founded, nothing is more signifi- 
cant than to see how instantly, and there- 
fore all the more suggestively, this thought 
of orderliness, of setting things in order, of 
Christianity itself as a divine order in the 
world, comes into view. When the Apostle 
who had founded the Church in Corinth is 
writing in that first letter of his to that 
Church, concerning the Sacrament of the 
Lord's Supper ; after he had rebuked those 
who had converted the Supper into an 
occasion of revelry and festivity, what 
is that injunction with which he con- 
cludes ? 

" And if any man hunger, let him eat at 
home : that ye come not together unto con- 



^9 

demnation. And the rest will I set in order 
when I come."* 

Again, when he sends out the men who 
were to preside over the infant Church he 
himself had planted, and to build up the 
handful of believers into something more 
than a little vagrant band in the waste of 
paganism, what is the charge he lays upon 
them ? Listen to the words that he writes 
to that Apostle whom he sends to preside 
over the churches in Crete : 

"For this cause left I thee in Crete, that 
thou shouldest set in order the things that 
are wanting, and ordain elders in every 
city, as I had appointed thee." f 

In other words, the new religion was not 
merely a new enthusiasm ; the new truth 
was not merely a new philosophy ; the new 
Teacher not merely a new teacher, but a 
King, even as in the face of Pontius Pilate 
He owned. $ He had come, not to leave an 
orphan Church in the world ; He had come 
to found a Divine Kingdom ; and the very 
essence of a kingdom, whether it be human 
or divine, is that it shall be founded upon 
principles of order, and upbuilt upon laws 



*I. Cor. xi.34. 

t Titus i. 5. 

X St. John xviii. 37. 



80 

which are fixed and determined from the 
beginning. 

Surely, a moment's reflection will per- 
suade us that that which was so necessary 
in the beginning, is no less necessary, nay, 
far more necessary, to-day. For, what is 
the difference between that condition of 
society to which the Christian religion 
came, and the condition of society as you 
and I know it to-day? On one thing I think 
we will all be agreed, and that is, that life 
is enormously fuller now than then. The 
various agencies which have opened the 
mind of man to contact with other men, 
the various scientific discoveries, like steam, 
and electricity, and printing, have somehow 
multiplied life, so that the points of contact 
and relation with our fellow-men have been 
increased almost indefinitely. 

But what are the consequences of such a 
condition of things ? The voices that speak 
to us, the claims that address themselves to 
us, the appeals that reach our sympathy, 
must needs be no- less multiplied, and so 
they are. What most torments people, with 
sympathies and aptitudes for doing service 
for Christ in His Church to-day, is the very 
multiplicity of the claims upon their time, 
and attention, and emotions. How con- 



31 

stantly our ears are tried with the voices 
that come to us saying, "Come over and 
help us " — those cries of sorrow or want ? 
that rise up around us on every hand ! And 
therefore it is, that if we are to do the work 
of Christ, without wasting our forces and 
throwing away our strength and frittering 
our energies in the doing of it, we must, 
first of all, recognize the inevitable neces- 
sity of being subject to the Eealm of Order. 

What now, are the conditions of that 
realm ? 

I. The first which I would name is Dis- 
crimination. This is a condition which lies 
at the threshold of any true fealty to the 
Realm of Order. In the matter of Christian 
work, the first question, in other words, for 
you, for me, to decide, is this : There are 
some things which are worth doing, and 
there are some things which are not worth 
doing. There are a great many other things, 
it may be, which are worth doing, if we 
were sure of absolute leisure, if we had no 
home ties or other claims upon our atten- 
tion, and if our obligations were so isolated 
that we could draw a sharp line around 
them and ignore everything outside of them; 
but that is impossible. And so, the first 
condition of service for one who would serve 



32 

God is, that he or she shall recognize that 
there are certain things which have a su- 
perior claim, and which must be done with 
the clear understanding that, in order to do 
them, other things which call perhaps with 
more clamorous voices, must be let alone. 

Again; we must recognize in accordance 
with this principle of discrimination as the 
first condition of the Eealm of Order, that 
there are some things, which by our train- 
ing and station we are fitted to do, and 
others which we are not fitted to do. How 
often it comes to pass, that we set our hand 
to some task or service, just because it has 
a sentimental side ! Or, again, how often 
is it that we yield to the importunities of a 
friend to associate ourselves in some enter- 
prise, of which, if we were honestly to an- 
alyze it, we should find that that friend is 
himself or herself a largest part. Take that 
element out, and the thing does not honestly 
appeal to our intelligence, our judgment or 
our sympathies. The first duty under such 
conditions is to separate the work which 
comes to you with an appeal for co-operation 
or sympathy, from the mere personal ele- 
ment, which, in this life of ours, is often the 
most potent element in warping and pervert- 
ing our judgments. What we want to know 



83 

about any work is, first of all, whether it is 
relatively worth doing ; secondly, whether 
it is a work which we can best do ; and, 
thirdly, whether it is the work, which being 
the work which we can best do and being 
relatively worth doing, of all other work, 
lo-day, comes to us with most direct and 
strenuous call. 

Bring this principle of discrimination into 
your life, and how, straightway, confusion, 
and torment, and unrest will disappear out 
of it. You know how it is in the home, 
where one gets up in the morning with a 
thousand petty cares appealing to her, and 
where there is not that calm judgment and 
deliberation first of all in the closet, as to 
the tasks of the day, which clears the air, 
and so steadies one with the sense of the 
supreme importance of things which are 
fundamental, and with the secondary im- 
portance of things not fundamental. Who 
of us does not know from bitter experience, 
how, pulled hither and thither by conflict- 
ing thoughts, tormented all the day long by 
questions that we strive to answer and can- 
not, when the day is done, we sit down and 
fold our hands in the consciousness that it 
has been from the beginning to the end a 
failure, simply because in the beginning of 



34 

it there was not a reference to and a rever- 
ence for this law of the Realm of Order, 
nor any wise discrimination as to the claims 
of relative duties. 

There is a very striking illustration of 
what I mean, in the sixth chapter of the 
Book of the Acts of the Apostles, when the 
infant Church, having grown out of its 
earlier feebleness, had come to have what it 
has to-day in such large measure, those de- 
pendent upon its eleemosynary care, need- 
ing the ministration of its alms. " In those 
days," we read, " when the number of 
the disciples was multiplied, there arose a 
murmuring of the Grecians against the 
Hebrews, because their widows were neg- 
lected in the daily ministration."* The 
issue, as were all others, was taken to the 
Apostles. Now, the first instinctive line of 
action, for one who had not recognized this 
principle of discrimination in the ordering 
of his daily life, would have been for these 
Apostles to have gone down into the midst 
of this business of ministration and under- 
taken to correct the unfairness on the one 
hand, and the neglect on the other, in re- 
gard to the matter of the ministration of 

* Acts vi. 



35 

alms to the widows of Grecians and He- 
brews, by personal intervention. 

But with that inspired wisdom, which 
not only laid the foundation of the Church, 
but raised it out of its elementary crude- 
ness, the Apostle declares of those who 
were ordained to preach the Gospel, and 
to lay the foundations of the Church, that 
" it was not reason that they should leave 
the Word of God and serve tables." Serv- 
ing tables is not an unworthy work for us 
of the Ministry. If one comes to our door, 
it is not beneath our dignity to feed him. 
But there are other forces and powers in 
the Church which can do this precisely as 
well as we can do it ; and if so, we are to 
recognize that there is such a thing as a law 
of discrimination ; that that which is great- 
er is not to be neglected for that which is 
less; that the concerns of the spiritual life 
are not to be overlooked for concerns of the 
temporal ; that the activities of the Church 
of God — often a danger in our days — are 
not to engross themselves with mere matters 
of outward ministry, so that they forget to 
dispense that godly counsel and those sav- 
ing truths which are to be the primary 
powers in turning men from darkness to 
light. 



36 

II. Again, there is a second condition of 
the Realm of Order — I mean, Subordination. 
The moment that we look at the infant 
Church, we find that in it there were what 
we call different orders of men. There were 
those who were Apostles ; there were those 
who were indiscriminately the first Elders 
or Bishops, those who were Presbyters, and 
those, like these of whom w r e read in the 
sixth chapter of the Acts of the Apostles, who 
were Deacons, and as some of us believe, 
those also who were Deaconesses. In other 
words, no sooner does the Church develop 
an order, than it develops a subordination 
in orders. And this law of subordination, 
which from the beginning the world has 
been trying to get rid of, it resents, it 
breaks out of, it throws over the wall, only 
surely and inevitably to bring it back again. 
We who are here are members of a society, 
and part of a state, which calls itself 
a Republic ; a protest, we say, against 
those monarchical forms of government, 
w T ith their investment of almost absolute 
power in the sovereign, which existed in 
less enlightened days. But it is doubtful 
whether any sovereign in Europe has as 
much absolute power, especially in connec- 
tion with the appointment of subordinates, 



37 

as is vested, at this very moment, in the 
President of the United States. In other 
words, we may call the form of government 
what we will, sooner or later it comes to 
this, that there must be some ultimate dis- 
penser of authority, some ultimate voice 
that shall give the word of command, in 
matters of duty and service, in every com- 
pany, little or great. 

I am sensible that here I am speaking of 
a matter of great difficulty and delicacy. 
How easy submission to rule would be, if 
authority were always exercised with wis- 
dom, meekness, and love ! To yield, to a 
sounder judgment, when its decisions are 
made plain to us in kindly ways, and with- 
out harshness or arbitrariness of tone, is 
not ordinarily hard. But when authority is 
exercised imperiously or dictatorial! y, to 
yield to it is sometimes almost impossible, 
even if, as under such circumstances we 
are tempted to believe, it is not actually 
wrong. And it is here that there often 
arises, therefore, one of the severest trials to 
temper and character, in such work as 
most of you are doing. It must needs be 
done, if it is to be done at all, in subordina- 
tion to rule and authority, and at this point 
you in this church to-day, who are, whether 



38 

as parishioners in a parish, or members 
of a religious society, or associated in 
some parochial fellowship, working under 
the general oversight and direction of some 
one over you in the Lord, must be aware of 
the difficulty of which I speak. God forbid 
that I should forget the fact, that those who 
are over us in the Church are men of like 
passions with ourselves, of abundant infir- 
mities of judgment; easily intoxicated, it 
may be, now and then, with authority ; 
self-willed sometimes, inconsiderate, not 
always wise nor thoughtful of others' feel- 
ings. But, in the case of men set over 
women, this is but to suggest the question, 
How can we expect that men shall always be 
sufficiently thoughtful of the sensitiveness of 
women, when they are not women them- 
selves f No doubt, of tener than otherwise, 
men are impatient of suggestion, impatient 
of counsel or advice, even from those older 
and wiser than themselves, especially of 
women, just because it seems to them to der- 
ogate from their official authority. If my 
brother clergy were present I might speak of 
this matter with more frankness. Mean- 
time, let us remember that this is a part of 
the inevitable friction of that condition of 
infirmity and sin, in which the Church finds 



39 

itself to-day. It is not greatly different, 
after all, with women or men. In the little 
parochial society, as every one of you 
knows, there are jealousies, because those 
at the head of the circle of workers are there, 
sometimes, for some very secondary consid- 
eration of wealth or influence, or of mere 
seniority in service. Now, we do not always 
name ourselves, or our own claims, in such 
a connection, but perhaps we say that an- 
other working beside us is so much better 
able to take the helm and steer the little 
ship, and set in array the battle, than she to 
whom the task has actually been entrusted. 
And then, when we are conscious in our 
work that this other set over us is not 
always considerate of our judgment or 
patient of our suggestion, that the briefer 
and the smaller the authority — alas, that it 
is so often so ! — the more strenuously it is 
asserted and the more imperiously shown — 
then I am bound to confess that acquies- 
cence, submission, for the sake of bringing 
order out of confusion, is sometimes an ex- 
tremely difficult thing to render. 

And yet it belongs to us to remember that 
there can be no service without submission, 
and that, however ignorant, self-willed or 
inconsiderate those may be who are over us 



40 

in any work, it is possible for us, at any rate, 
to lift them up into a nobler capacity for 
their service of rulership, by two things: first 
of all, by the loyalty with which we acqui- 
esce in an authority which has been rightly 
ordained ; and secondly, by the frank, un- 
reserved candor with which we speak in 
love those thoughts of criticism or dissent* 
which, just because they are not told out 
into the ears of those they are meant for, 
rankle and fester, until at last they breed 
that bitterness out of which comes the fail- 
ure of the whole enterprise. 

How different it would have been if at 
this or that point in some heated contro- 
versy, when we differed from one whose 
duty it was to conduct the work we did 
in common, we had first of all recognized 
the eternal righteousness, in a world and 
realm of order, of the principle of subordi- 
nation, and then had striven to render our 
service as loyally to the constituted author- 
ity as we could ; and then, when we could 
not go further, had spoken to the other 
in frankness and in tenderness and love,, 
instead of speaking of him behind his 
back, in bitterness and resentment and 
impatience ; for, just as truly as the 
Realm of Order involves, first of all, dis- 



41 

crimination, just so truly it involves also 
subordination. 

III. And then the other and final condi- 
tion of the Realm of Order, which after 
all is of supremest consequence, is Inspira- 
tion. A. very striking book, ' ' Christianity 
in Nature," which is one of the most sug- 
gestive disclosures of the witness to the re- 
ligion of Jesus Christ which may be found 
in the world of nature, that has been 
written in our own generation, uses, if 1 rec- 
ollect aright, this illustration : 

The writer draws the picture of a stream 
running through the forest, beside which 
there stands one day an explorer, who de-* 
termines to build a mill. What is it that 
he must do in order that the mill which he 
builds shall grind his grain and do the work 
for which he has built it? This: He must 
set his mill-wheel in the stream and current 
of the on-rushing tide, so that the law of 
gravitation which drives the stream onward 
in its course shall turn the wheel which his 
ingenuity has devised, with least waste of 
power and largest economy of his natural 
resources. In other words, unless he places 
himself in line with those divine increments 
of power which God has bound up in 
nature, he may build his machinery of 



42 

costliest material and direct his mill with 
utmost skill, and he will have done both in 
vain. 

And so it is in our work for Christ in His 
Church or in the world. It is supremely 
necessary for us to recognize that God is a 
God of order, that so we may put ourselves 
into position — we who are Christian work- 
ers — for His divine inspiration ; adjusting 
our task, our whole order of life, our hours 
of service and rest, so that through them 
all there may flow that ever-quickening and 
ever-moving current of a divine life, which 
alone turns deadness into power and weak- 
ness into strength. Before us, as we sit here 
to-day, there is this altar of the Living God 
to which presently we are to draw near, for 
the strengthening of His Holy Sacrament. 
Ah, my sisters, when the indwelling power 
of that divine life does its work in us, 
what will be our service, our courage, our 
conquests ! First and last, then, we are to 
recognize that submission to the Realm of 
Order means expectancy and waiting upon 
the Divine power, dependence on those 
treasures of grace which are stored in the 
everlasting storehouse of God. 

One word, in conclusion, as to what will 
be the sure fruits of this submission to the 



43 

Eealm of Order. First of all, we may count 
upon rest and peace. The difference be- 
tween a life lived in accordance with the 
Realm of Order, and one which is not, is 
the difference between anarchy and sov- 
ereignty, the difference between self-con- 
trol and self-torment, between strength and 
weakness. Get your life into a divine or- 
der. Get it into affiliation with, and sub- 
mission to, principles of eternal law. Get 
it into dependence upon the divine strength; 
and then what a new thing, when you rise 
in the morning, the day will be ! 

And next to rest and peace will come 
strength. Here is a heap of stones dumped 
down into the street. Imagine each stone 
instinct with life, and having it in its power 
to fling itself, in some wild way, into some 
other aggregate of atoms than tbat in which 
it finds itself. And then, imagine, on the 
other hand, that, conscious of the sover- 
eignty in the world of the rule and Realm 
of Order, each one of these atoms takes it- 
self and places itself upon certain lines, and 
upbuilds each one upon the other, step by 
step, in accordance with the eternal laws of 
construction, and you have instead a wall 
which shall stand the storms of centuries, 
and defy the hand of the strongest enemy. 



44 

Just so it is, when we come to take our 
life out of the condition of chaos and bring 
it within the domain of the Realm of Order. 
When once you take your work, whether in 
the parochial society, or sisterhood, or in the 
street, out of the realm of confusion and 
bring it into the Realm of Order, with set 
time, with a recognition of things that are 
primary and secondary, with a reverence 
for a due subordination, then you have be- 
come straightway, not an element of con- 
fusion in the world, but a tower of strength, 
. and men will look up to you, and lean on 
you, because they see in you that columnar 
quality, which is the fruit of obedience to 
law. 

And then, finally, the last result of this 
submission to the Realm of Order is the 
great and blessed assurance that our work 
will have in it continuity and perpetuity. 
Ah ! how many people there are in the 
world — of how many of us here it may be 
true to-day — that with our aims wedded to 
some true and precious cause, to which we 
have given our strength and means and time 
— the fact that plagues us all the time is this: 
What will become of it when I am gone ? 
who will take it up and care for it and 
carry it on then ? I am but a waif, and the 



45 

great world rushes on and wipes out the 
mightiest and humblest alike with its inevi- 
table flow. What will be the fate of this 
little effort of mine, this striving for God 
and some poor child of His, in the end ? 

I wish I could read to you just here the 
story of a young girl in England, who, 
moved by what she saw drink had done in 
a barrack town on the south coast, went 
alone into the places where there were sol- 
diers and sailors, following them sometimes 
into the lowest haunts, following them 
with a persistence, a tenderness and a 
patience, that would take no denial, and 
waiting for recognition through long years, 
until, slowly, out of her single-handed 
effort, lo ! it came. Just because, from 
first to last, having, all the while, a plan of 
her own, she was ready, as she said, at any 
moment to lose herself in some larger plan 
for the work, that larger plan came and 
took her, and through her created one of 
the mightiest agencies for the reform of in- 
temperance, that is to be found in the 
Christian world to-day. 

It was because of the faith of such a 
woman as Sarah Robinson, holding on to 
the conviction that her effort was a part of 
God's own divine plan, holding on also to 



46 

a clear and definite line of duty, until at 
last she was able to lose herself in a larger 
plan — it was because of this that her 
name has become immortal in the history 
of Christian service in our time ; even as 
it was this which at first won a way into 
the hearts of those to whom she went and 
for whom she strove. 

So with you and me, whatever the task 
may be, and however small and unknown. 
If we begin it with a wise discrimination, 
continue it with a wise subordination, and 
above all, if we begin and continue and end 
it with a supreme reference to a divine in- 
spiration, it will not fail. Somewhere, 
some other heart will kindle into a flame 
for the sake of those for whom we labor, 
and our labors, long after we are gone, will 
endure, because we have begun and contin- 
ued and ended them in obedience to the 
laws of the Eealm of Order. 

God's we are, God's we shall be in the 
world to come. His is the Kingdom which 
is to triumph over all confusion. To redeem 
it from that confusion, His Son has come 
into the world. Let us draw near to Him, 
and, yielding up our life to His control, 
have every lawless and unordered thought 
and aim made subject to His Will ! 



€nbs cm& Instrument. 

An Address delivered in the Church du Saint 
Esprit, New York. Monday, February 15, 1886, at the 
Service for Women engaged in Church work. 



ENDS AND INSTRUMENTS. 



Our theme to-day is Ends and Instruments, 
and in the fifty-fourth chapter of the Prophet 
Isaiah there is a single verse which, as ex- 
pressively as any other in the two Testaments, 
opens the whole subject for our discussion. 
That chapter, as perhaps you will recollect, 
is a part of the prophecy with which Isaiah 
is bidden to prepare the mind of Israel for 
that greater destiny which awaited it. In 
an age of national decadence, and in a time 
when a large part of its people were in cap- 
tivity, God speaking to His Prophet, reveals 
to him that other and nobler future which 
awaited His chosen nation, when led out of 
bondage they should know a perfect liberty, 
and when all the way along they should be 
conscious that behind them there was a 
Divine purpose, moulding and controlling 
events. And in pursuance of that thought, 
these words are put into the mouth of the 
Prophet : " Behold, I have created the 
smith that bloweth the coal in the fire, and 



50 

that bring forth an instrument for his 
work," by which, undoubtedly, God designs 
to remind those to whom He speaks through 
His prophet, of two truths, equally pertinent 
and helpful to us who are here to-day. 

One of these is that general truth of 
His own sovereignty. Man is God's instru- 
ment. He acts under a Divine guidance and 
inspiration, even when, like Cyrus, the pagan 
king, he is not conscious of it, and this he 
himself illustrates by those constructive 
powers of his, with which in turn he forges 
the instruments, which, like the smith's, are 
used for his daily work. 

Now, if you have ever seen a forge fire, 
you have seen one of those things which, 
with the least interesting aspect externally, 
become attractive, even instructive, the 
moment that you recognize the processes 
which are going on there. If one were 
blowing the bellows and hammering a mass 
of iron, turning it to and fro with his hand 
as he did so, without an aim or object, the 
whole spectacle would be equally meaning- 
less and grotesque. But as you watch the 
smith, you see the great mass of molten 
metal which he handles at the end of his 
tongs, under those successive blows of the 
hammer which he deals, assume, little by 



51 

little, a definite shape. It may be a plow- 
share that he is moulding, or a pruning- 
hook; an instrument of peace, or an instru- 
ment of war. The thing that is significant 
is, that the crude metal is slowly becoming 
some sort of an instrument. The expendi- 
ture of labor is not for labor's sake alone. 
Beyond the labor there is an end. In the 
eye and mind of the laborer, every step, 
every blow, is directed to a definite result ; 
and nothing is more interesting than to 
watch the way in which, out of the most 
hopeless and apparently obstinate mass of 
crude material, skill will sooner or later 
educe a tool which shall do the tasks of the 
world and subdue the obstinacy of Nature. 

But go a step further. Have you ever 
thought of that other tool — which has so 
much to do with the fashioning of the tool 
itself ? What is it that enables the smith to 
shape either the pruning-hook or the plow- 
share? You say it is the thought which 
conceives those images in his brain, and the 
will which resolves to put them into execu- 
tion. But a thought is an unborn child, 
and like any other unborn child, may never 
see the light. That which enables it to 
live is the act by which the thought is 
translated into some visible expression, and 



52 

therefore behind the thought of the smith 
there must be the hand of the smith. He 
who worketh in the coals cannot think out 
and excogitate and will into boing the plow- 
share or the pruning-hook; there must be that 
other tool, that most marvellous of all in- 
struments, I think, which we call the human 
•hand. Was there ever in all the world, a 
tool, an instrument, like that ? We say that 
it cannot see, but in the case of those who 
are without sight how truly it becomes 
' ' eyes to the blind " ! We say that it cannot 
speak, and yet a gesture will be sometimes 
infinitely more expressive than a word ; an 
averted hand will tell as much or more than 
the averted face and the most resentful 
speech. 

And then, think of the ministries of the 
human hand, as they apply themselves to 
sorrow and suffering. We go into the dark- 
ened chamber of some friend, to whom, if 
we could, we would speak a word of com- 
fort in a great sorrow, and the most we can 
do, and often the best, is by the silent, con- 
stant pressure of the hand, to give expres- 
sion to a sympathy which words only blun- 
der in telling, and which we convey far more 
expressively just because we tell it with- 
out words. Again: here is a wound; how 



53 

shall it be healed ? With medicine, you say. 
Yes, bat what— as day by day we are being 
taught so wonderfully in this day of trained 
skill — what is there in the whole realm of 
material relief, so effective to bear upon 
pain and misery and bodily suffering, as 
the ministry of a human hand? Watch a 
trained nurse bandage a limb,and then watch 
a philosopher attempt the same task. This 
deft instrument, this marvellous weapon, 
sensitive, strong, delicate, nimble, is of all 
other marvels in the world, it seems to me, 
in the way of instruments, the most mar- 
vellous. 

And what is it that makes it so ? Plainly, 
its adapted n ess to its tasks. Think how 
tender it can be ! Consider how, in those 
processes of engraving which are the finest 
and most delicate, and which have to do 
with the manufacturing of money or its 
equivalent — there is developed in the palm 
of the hand a sensitiveness so fine in the 
treatment of a steel or copper plate, that no 
agency which the wit of man has invented, 
has ever been able to take the place of that 
primitive touch. Think again, how the 
hand is adapted for tasks at once grave and 
delicate ; how it can hold or push or pull, 
with what gentleness it can touch a wound, 



54 

and minister to a diseased body, almost as 
imperceptibly as the very breath of the air. 
What is it, all the way along, I ask you, 
that impresses us in the marvellous, this 
incomparable tool? It is its adaptedness to 
the tasks which in this world God has given 
it to do. 

And that reminds us of that paiuful dis- 
agreement, that want of harmony between 
ends and instruments which, in other and 
higher tools than those of the hand, is one 
of the most trying and disheartening ex- 
periences of life. We look at the work 
which we are doing ourselves, we look at 
the work other men and women are trying 
to do for Christ, and we recognize, very 
often, the most cordial purpose, the most 
honest consecration of gifts and talents, and 
as the end of them all, the most dismal 
failure. What is the explanation of the 
failure ? It is often simply that, unlike the 
human hand, the instrument has undertaken 
a task for which it was not adapted. 

(a) This may come in many ways. In the 
first place, from want of native aptitude, a 
w r ant, which, in taking up our particular 
work in life, whether it be a secular or a 
spiritual calling, is a matter far too little 
regarded. In the child that grows up 



55 

under the shadow of our own teaching, 
there are qualities that differentiate him 
from any other. Here is the boy at your 
knee, whom you would fain see great at the 
bar or in matter of science. Here is the girl 
to whom you look, when she grows to 
womanhood, to lift off a little those domestic 
cares that have fretted you all through her 
childhood, and which you have borne 
patiently, thinking that one day they were 
to be divided with another. And she grows 
up with an exquisite sense of color, a singu- 
lar genius for music, or for rendering some 
humane service to other people, but without 
the least adaptedness for those tasks which 
to you seem the most important. And the 
boy whom you would fain have to love 
books and the paths of high emprise, finds 
his interest, it may be, in a piece of mechan- 
ism, develops tastes utterly alien to those 
which you yourself have, or that belong to 
any ancestor whom you can recall ; and 
then such an one has his life spoiled, perhaps, 
just because you insist upon coercing his 
native want of aptitude in a channel for 
which it was not ordained. 

To us who are here to-day, this question 
of aptitude is one which ought to lie at the 
very beginning of any Christian work what- 



56 

ever. Our own native powers are a part of 
the endowment which God has given us for 
serving Him in the world. So far as we re- 
fuse to understand them, just in that de- 
gree, we shall be sure to go astray in any 
service that we undertake to do for Him. 

(6) And then, next to that mistake, there 
is the other and far commoner one which 
we make, in undertaking any work given us 
to do, in spite of our want of training for it. 
Take the illustration which I have already 
used — of one who undertakes to dress a 
wound, or to minister to one who is in physi- 
cal pain, without the education of the hand 
and the eye, which are the indispensable 
requisites for every such ministry. I might 
bring the brightest man in the world to sit 
beside the bedside of one stricken down with 
some sore disease, and if he did not under- 
stand the relation of some simple remedy to 
the case before him, his wisdom and theo- 
retical knowledge would only be an embar- 
rassment in his ministration. Discipline, 
education, that is, training, is the one ele- 
ment often which distinguishes failure from 
success. 

(c) Again, still another explanation of so 
much of the failure that we find in life and 
in our own work, in this matter of ends and 



57 

instruments, is our habit often of over-tax- 
ing an instrument adapted for a certain 
work and abundantly well trained for it. 
What is more painful, when we look out on 
the daily life of a city like this, than to see 
so many people — yes, and as we go through 
the streets, so many brute beasts— on whom 
are laid burdens larger than they can bear ; 
whose are gifts, training, taste and predilec- 
tion, but who are overweighted in the work 
they have to do, with a task so much too 
large for them, that failure in it is fore-or- 
dained before they begin. 

Now, such facts as these, in connection 
with that subject which we are considering 
here, of the adaptedness of instruments to 
those ends which they undertake to achieve, 
suggest to us the question, how are we to 
correct and avoid these specific evils and 
errors to which I have alluded ? 

I. In the first place — and it is a matter 
of sincere thankfulness that more and more 
in our age that fact is being recognized — 
we are to correct the disproportion, the mal- 
adjustment of instruments to ends, by a 
knowledge of our own gifts and aptitudes 
and character. What is wanted at the 
threshold of any task which involves per- 
sistent service, and looks forward to effectual 



53 

results, is that you and I should, first of all, 
understand ourselves: what it is in the way 
of native aptitude that God has given us, 
and so, having taken account of ourselves, 
should understand the native resources at 
our command. 

II. And next to that, and no less im- 
portant, is the matter of training. Here 
again, we have much to be thankful for in 
that classification of work which is more 
and more a characteristic of our day. This 
is an age of specialists, and if the work of 
the world is to be done, it must be by means 
of special endeavors. In other words, in 
the Christian service that we do for the 
ignorant, the relief of poverty, the arresting 
of vice, the saving of the fallen — in all 
these tasks that in our day have grown so 
large, to do them effectively, there must be 
in every case somebody who is willing, first 
of all, to learn how to do them, and who by 
training has learned the deftness and the 
skill which are the indispensable pre-re- 
quisities of success. 

Some of you here this morning, have had 
an experience in Sunday-school work. I 
wonder if any young girl, or any woman no 
longer a girl, looking back to such a time, 
can forget the first time when she sat down 



59 

and confronted a Sunday-school class ? That 
sense of overwhelming helplessness that 
came upon her as she realized that she was 
set there in the office of a teacher, and 
with the responsibility of not misleading 
minds in the understanding of the truth 
— how keen it was ! With the Word of 
God in her hand, she was to unfold its 
meaning, to those that came there to learn 
at her mouth the way of the Lord. But how? 
With what previous training? I think, we 
are bound to confess, especially we who are 
ministers of Christ, that oftener than other- 
wise, in the incompetency, the inadequacy, 
the utter unfitness, that exist in such cases 
on the part of the instrument, the responsi- 
bility belongs not so much to the young, un- 
fledged, inexperienced teacher, as to those 
who, over her in the Lord, have set her to 
a task for which she is so poorly trained. 
Teaching — is it a natural gift? to make 
clear to another the way of eternal life — 
is that a sort of thing which you can take up 
and put down, as you would take up a task 
in needle-work ? And so of anything else we 
are called to do for Christ, even though it 
be so humble as a task in needle- work — the 
very first condition on which we ought to 
insist with reference to ourselves, or any 



60 

others set to do Christ's work in His Church 
and for His children, is that there shall go be- 
fore it some sort of preparation. A.nd there- 
fore, when we are asked to undertake such 
work, it would be a wise precaution if we 
demanded of those who asked us, "How do 
you propose to enable me to do this work ef- 
fectually ? Give me some sort of preliminary 
teaching and instruction which will fit me 
to do it to edification ; give me a school in 
which I can learn thus to serve Christ, 
and then I may be able to say that I will 
consent to do so." * 

And here I want to call the attention of 
those to whom I speak, whose work may lie 
among the poor to the great opportunties 
afforded them of educating a body of helpers 
to re-enforce them in their work, by taking 
along with them, for a time, those who are 
willing to serve Christ in this way, but who 
are held back because of inexperince. 
When we open the New Testament and 
learn the way in which the greatest tasks of 
all were attempted by the men to whom 
they were assigned, nothing is more signifi- 
cant than that on all the occasions of which 
we read, the first workers for Christ went 
forth two and two. The work of laying 
the foundation of the Church, the preaching 



61 

of the Gospel, were done not singly, but, as 
a rule, with one more experienced and one 
less experienced worker, working and mov- 
ing side by side. Believe me, if we could 
establish that simple rule in the work we 
are trying to do, instead of isolating our en- 
deavors so much as we do, the result would 
greatly inspire and surprise us. 

III. And then, finally, we are to recognize 
the fact in this matter of adjustment of 
instruments to ends, that a most wholesome 
discipline in the education of any one of us, 
for any task which Christ calls us to do, 
is not so much success as failure. " Happy 
are the people," is a Hindoo proverb, 
" Happy are the people who began by fail- 
ing." And it is a proverb of enduring 
truthfulness. As I stand here, there comes 
back to me the memory of a great thinker, 
whose services to the Christian religion we 
may well remember, as we acknowledge 
the hospitality of this pastor and flock of 
French lineage, and whose name and work 
we may well honor, as placing us and our 
children and our children's children under 
enduring obligations. Who of you here 
this morning has not read the story of 
Blaise Pascal and the Port Royalists, that 
marvellous man, who, coming out of com- 



62 

parative obscurity, made the whole Church 
of Rome to tremble at the courage with 
which he challenged its errors, and who, in 
his Provincial Letters, has left a literature, 
which, I venture to predict, will endure as 
long as the graceful and versatile and fervid 
tongue in which he wrote it. But do you 
know that Blaise Pascal, the philosopher, 
the Christian teacher, the reformer of an 
age, and almost of a Church, began his 
work as a boy of eighteen in a mechanic's 
shop, where he spent week after week and 
month after month, in vain endeavors to 
manufacture a calculating machine, the 
model of which was the germ out of which 
came that other and still more marvellous 
mechanism which we know as the calcula- 
ting machine of Mr. Babbage ? 

Now, then, when Pascal set himself to 
that task, he made not merely the one model, 
or two, or a dozen, but fifty. He made them 
in steel, he made them in brass, he made 
them in ebony, he made them in ivory. 
Baffled and defeated at one time, he turned 
back to the very beginning, and went over 
the whole complicated business again and 
again and again. And though the instru- 
ment, which at last he completed, never 
received the recognition on the part of the 



63 

scientific world which he himself expected r 
thus dooming: him to another disappoint- 
ment, he was himself, by that supreme dis- 
cipline, that persistent and resolute en- 
deavor, educated to be an instrument in the 
hand of God of almost incalculable service to 
future generations. For, out of that baffled 
endeavor, out of successive failures, stum- 
bling and falling and beaten back, but re- 
fusing to be conquered, there came the 
spirit of resolute courage, which, when he 
had to face a hostile time and to challenge 
a hostile Church, gave him the clear insight, 
the resolute purpose, the almost divine per- 
sistency, which has made his name in the 
realm of Christian thought, immortal. 

And this, my dear friends, lifts us to a 
higher and still larger view of the whole 
subject. You and I want to fit ourselves, in 
this matter of Christian service, to be instru- 
ments that shall accomplish an end. We 
want to know our native gifts, we want to 
cultivate them by a wise training, we want 
to be willing to humble and to discipline 
them into strength, by failure. Yes, but all 
the time, from the beginning to the end, we 
want to bear in mind this great, this precious 
and inspiring truth, that we ourselves are, 
after all, but instruments, and that the end 



64 

of our work is not in our hands, but in 
God's. There is a little book, called "The 
Problem of the Poor," in which you will 
rind the story of Elspeth, a German servant, 
who, living on the east side of this city, 
and doing first a work of delegated philan- 
thropy for an invalid lady, took up, after 
her mistress had died, the work which at 
first she had done as proxy for another, and 
broadened and widened it, until it became 
a blessing to the whole neighborhood. Get 
the book, and read the story called "One 
Woman's Work," and see how, dominating 
that humble but helpful life, there was this 
mightiest secret of service and motor of ac- 
tion, the consciousness that this humble in- 
strument was a tool in the hand of God. 

You and I will go presently to the most 
comfortable and helpful Sacrament of the 
Body and Blood of Christ. And for what ? 
For this, that first of all we may put our- 
selves anew in the hands of One whose 
instruments we are. Let us be willing to 
lie still as His tools, in the Hand that is 
mightier than the human hand. And let 
us remember too, for that is the unspeakable 
consolation, which, as a door turning on 
golden hinges, opens to us the fairest and 
most blessed vision of all, that if, here and to- 



65 

day, the end and the instrument have been 
but poorly mated, if the best of us must feel, 
as who of us does not sometimes, how poorly 
matched he is with his task, and how too 
large are the burdens which he bears — for 
each there is coming a life and a service, 
when the instrument and the end shall be 
perfectly mated, and when, in the presence 
and under the inspiration of a Divine 
Strength, the tasks, which, as we try to do 
them here, seem too discouraging, will come 
to us with a new and gracious invitation, 
just because, there, in the better service, in 
the Perfect Presence, in the fellowship of a 
close and constant contact with our Al- 
mighty Friend and Helper, we shall see our 
work with perfect vision, and touch, all the 
while, the Hand that gives us the courage 
and the strength to do it. 



* 



Illusions mx0 Mtais. 

An Address delivered in the Church of the Ascen- 
sion, New York, on Monday, March 1, 1886, at the 
Service for Women engaged in Church work. 



ILLUSIONS AND IDEALS. 



Our subject this morning is Illusions and 
Ideals, and I shall speak of it, as you can 
readily understand, of necessity, under those 
special limitations which connect it with 
this place and these services. 

In a thoughtful volume which I laid down 
the other day, there occurs a conversation 
between two friends, provoked by that very 
natural enthusiasm which one of them had 
expressed, in regard to the advantages of 
living in this generation with the larger 
light and knowledge and opportunity which 
have come especially to Christian people, 
through the manifold gains of this nine- 
teenth century. 

In answer to this, his companion replies 
that he wishes he could join with his friend 
in that expression of enthusiasm, but is con- 
strained to confess that he cannot. ' 'Look- 
ing back from to-day," he says in sub- 
stance, " there are ages which we call the 
Dark Ages, and which most of us have been 
taught to despise. They were ages of more 



70 

imperfect knowledge, and of abundant su- 
perstition, and they were, as a result of that 
superstition, sometimes ages of great cruelty 
and wrong. But, on the other hand, they 
were ages of a simpler and more childlike 
faith. They were ages, when, if you choose, 
men had illusions in abundance, but were 
made happy by them ; when Heaven was 
nearer, when the earth was more interesting 
just because it was more mysterious, and 
when life, girt about though it was by what 
we call a thousand fables, was somehow a 
more fascinating, just because a more un- 
intelligible thing. 

"T\ T e have torn away the mask to-day; we 
have shattered the illusions of the past. 
Knowledge, with its insatiable curiosity, has 
dispelled a great many of our dreams. The 
traditions, the superstitions, as we call them, 
of our ancestors, have vanished — are we 
happier for their loss ? Is it a gain to know 
so much ? Is it a real progress, at any rate 
in peace of mind, to have destroyed these 
earlier illusions ? Was not the childlike 
state, in its comparative innocence of evil, 
in its simple and confiding faith, on the 
whole a more blessed, more peaceful and 
joyous state than that to which we have 
come to-day?" 



71 

I. Now I think we can sympathize with 
that feeling, even though we may be ever 
so enthusiastic concerning our own times. 
No one who has passed the threshold of 
youthful life, is ignorant of painful ex- 
perience—with most of us, alas, to be deep- 
ened as life goes along — of the decay of 
earlier illusions. If we go no farther afield 
than ourselves, what illusions have been 
shattered, to us who have come to the 
burden and heat of the day, concerning 
our own characters, hopes and powers ! 
There was a time when we parted the por- 
tal and looked out at the world, kindled by 
some warm enthusiasm, or on fire with 
some great truth which had broken upon 
us for the first time, in the confidence that 
the tasks to which some clarion voice called 
us were the tasks for which we were abun- 
dantly adapted, and into which we had only 
to throw ourselves, to achieve certain vic- 
tory. 

We know better than that now. If no 
other illusion has been shattered, I venture 
to afiirm, that to most of those to whom I 
speak this morning, that illusion is at best 
a fading memory. We have learned that, 
whatever our courage, our daring, our pro- 
found faith in our own powers to achieve 



72 

results, results are not in our keeping ; that 
the best enthusiasm, the finest fervor, may 
hurl itself against some old evil, may cry- 
aloud in the market-place in most indignant 
protest, may lift up its hand and voice against 
some monstrous wrong, and may do it in 
vain. It is not enough that we are per- 
suaded of our own powers and of the merit 
of the cause in which we are enlisted to 
make us victorious. We have learned that 
such a faith in ourselves is an illusion. 

And then, again, take that other phase 
of life, which consists not in achieve- 
ment, but in resistance. Time was, when 
we were younger, more inexperienced, 
less familiar with the enormous power of 
evil, less set, it may be, in the place where 
the hot fires of temptation burnt upon us 
with most resolute force ; when the fall or 
the error or the misstep of another, seemed 
to us not only incredible but shameful ; 
when we said to ourselves, and said it with 
an honest confidence : "If I had been there, 
and if that temptation had challenged me r 
if that hot flush of passion had flamed up 
in my breast, I know I could have resisted 
it. I know how the evil thing would have 
been spurned ; I know that I would have 
been strong enough to come off a conqueror.'" 



73 

Our feet have slipped since then. The 
temptation has come and conquered us once 
and again. It may have been some subtle 
habit that, little by little, has encroached 
upon us, until day by day it has been a hard 
fight not to yield ourselves wholly to the 
mastery of it; some sin, that seems no 
greater than a sin of the tongue, like de- 
traction ; but as the years have gone on, we 
have learned this lesson, that our own 
powers of resistance are not sufficient for 
all the emergencies of life, and that the 
strength in us, equal, as we thought, to 
cope with any temptation, is, after all, too 
often an illusory strength. 

And then, yet again, in regard to our 
spiritual perceptions of God, our relation 
to Him and the world that is unseen. Ah ! 
once there was a time, when in fulfilment 
of those words of Wordsworth, that "Heav- 
en lies about us in our infancy," the realm 
of the unseen seemed somehow more close 
to our childish dreams than the realm that 
is seen. How is it to-day? Has the unseen 
grown closer or more remote ? Is the realm 
of the spiritual more real or unreal? Is 
not that faith which once seemed so clear 
and so firm, in danger its very self, some- 
times, of becoming to us an illusion of our 



74 

childhood, and the things which seemed to 
hold us fast, in danger of slipping wholly 
out of our grasp ? Our very power of spirit- 
ual perception, which once appeared so 
vivid, is it not, in one word, in danger of 
perishing utterly ? 

II. And again. When we turn from 
ourselves to our work, how is it there? You 
can remember, I fancy, every one of you, 
the time when you were first attracted to 
some interest or opportunity, and how it 
presented itself to you as the one exclusive 
claim of paramount importance in all the 
world. What a cause it was — whether of 
the ignorant, or the needy, or the outcast, 
— was there any other work like it ? Above 
all, was there any plan like that in which 
you yourself had become enlisted for 
doing this work? Was there not here at 
last the panacea that was to redeem the dis- 
orders of society, and uplift the fallen ones, 
and transform this old world of ours into a 
new Eden ? 

If you have gone a great way in the work 
you are doing, you have outgrown that illu- 
sion. You have found out, that, however 
opportune and urgent that work may be, it 
is but a small part, after all, of that mani- 
fold and many-sided service, by which the 



75 

world in bondage to sin is to be redeemed 
back again to the service of Jesus Christ. 
You have found out that your own methods 
are, after all, but very imperfect ; in one 
word, that your pet scheme for the regener- 
ation of the race is largely an illusion. 

And still more, perhaps, when you turn 
to the objects of it. The little children you 
wanted to save, the poor and destitute you 
wanted to house better, the needy you 
wanted to relieve — ah, how engaging they 
were when they first came to your notice ! 
How real seemed the need, how genuine the 
humility that presented itself in the persons 
of these deserving ones ! And then, one 
day, there comes an insincerity, and you 
find out that those whom you have been 
helping are not ingenuous in their poverty ; 
it may be that their poverty is not real, it 
may be that it is poverty allied to vice, and 
that everything you are doing to ennoble 
only conspires to degrade and pauperize; in 
a word, that these your heroes and heroines 
of the realm of the poor are so many fan- 
tastic illusions, whose virtues are largely the 
creation of your own imagination. 

And so of the rewards of our work. 
There was a time when that work itself was 
to us the keenest pleasure. In the beginning 



76 

of it, in the first freshness of the new love, 
you can remember how you said to yourself, 
"Can anybody tire of this service? What 
a charm there is about it, what a reward in 
the very doing it ! Only give me strength 
and courage, and my life will find its happi- 
ness in going in and out on such errands, 
and spending and being spent for Christ and 
His service." 

Said James Hinton, " Somebody asked 
me what I wanted to go and live in White 
Chapel for, and whether it was because I 
thought the nineteenth century needed a 
new illustration of martyrdom. I could 
not make them understand that those walks 
I took every afternoon in White Chapel, and 
the pleasure of sending my pictures to be 
exhibited among the most degraded people 
— that all this was itself a joy so keen and 
real, that I sometimes arraigned myself for 
the indulgence of what was a natural taste 
in me, and which found in their gratitude to 
whom I ministered, my best reward." God 
forbid that we should not find the same 
pleasure in our work. But, oh, if it would 
only last ! What a bright illusion vanishes, 
when we find out one day that the work 
once so sweet and gracious is so no longer ; 
when the consciousness of drudgery comes, 



77 

and when that confident belief which was 
itself the most inspiring illusion of all — that 
in the service we should find not only the 
privilege of doing Christ's work, but a daily 
joy in doing it — is no longer true; when we 
take up our task with a supreme sense of 
its weariness, and lay it down when the 
day is done, almost with a sense of thank- 
fulness. 

III. But all this, I think, we could en- 
dure, if it were not for the destruction of 
those other illusions, which have so much to 
do with the happiness of most of us, in any 
service or any life in this world — our illu- 
sions concerning our fellow- workers. Here 
is somebody who has kindled our whole 
interest into a flame. Here is a book which 
we read, which brings to us the life and 
work of some one we long to know. Here 
is a personality which somehow or other has 
come to bear upon our own need, whose 
call has awakened us out of the lethargy of 
our old indifference and sent us forth to do 
God's service, with the feeling that just so 
long as we can watch that other and be 
kindled by the tone of her voice, and quick- 
ened by the inspiration of her leadership, 
we can go on without weariness and with- 
out discouragement. And then, one day, 



78 

we come near and find that the fine gold is 
somehow dimmed. One day, this friend of 
ours is cold to us or preoccupied, or what is 
worse still, seems selfish. We discover how 
along with these graces and powers of lead- 
ership and of inspiration, there is a large hu- 
man element — it may be the love of adula- 
tion, or of power, it may be self-will, or 
self-seeking. No matter. As we detect the 
selfish motive, the dross among the gold, as 
we find that the rare sweetness can be 
clouded by fretfulness or impatience; that 
the character does not always ring quite 
true, that our hero, though his face be of 
gold, has hands of brass and it may be feet 
of iron, what a shock comes to us then ! 
How it seems as if not only our hero, 
our leader, our guide, were somehow un- 
real, or of the earth, but as if there could 
be nothing quite real, nothing in all the 
world that was not illusory, and as if, in- 
stead of holding fast to these inspirations 
which have come to us from contact with 
those whom we believed noble and unsel- 
fish, we must fling them all away. 

In the life of one of the most eminent 
servants of God, we find an answer to that 
state of mind, I think at once conclusive 
and complete. A great Apostle, speaking 



79 

of his earlier ministry and his child-life, 
says of himself : " When I was a child, I 
spake as a child, I understood as a child, I 
thought as a child; but when I became a 
man, I put away childish things." The 
child-life is the life of illusion; the child-life 
if the life of half-lights, of imperfect knowl- 
edge, of imagination, supplying the place 
of that discrimination and that intelligent 
perception, which is the gift not of child- 
hood, but of manhood and womanhood. 

Would we have it different ? Nay, could it 
be otherwise, even if we wished it? As with 
the infant, the half-light is all that its child- 
ish eye can bear, so with you and me. Led on 
by its imperfect rays to seek a clearer vision, 
it must needs be that that clearer vision, 
when it comes, shall often pain and surprise 
us. But it need not be the surrender of our 
faith in goodness that shall come to pass, be- 
cause of the dissipation of our illusions — 
nay, it ought not to be — but only the sur- 
render of our idols, the emancipation from 
that earlier and half -pagan hero-worship 
which put a human being on the throne of the 
Divine, and then would fain bow down and 
worship it. Surely any experience of disil- 
lusion is better than that, no matter what it 
costs; and when we see how such a process 



80 

of disillusion, as in the case of the child, 
brings us closer to that which is the Eter- 
nally True, we may well hail it as a blessing 
in disguise. As it was with the Apostle, so 
it must be unto you and me. 

First, there is the child-sight, imperfect, 
cloudy, ignorant, erecting its heroes into 
gods and goddesses, kindling itself into en- 
thusiasm with its half-knowledge and half- 
imagination, and then the time comes when 
the knowledge is more perfect, and the 
illusion is revealed in its true character, and 
we discover how false were a great many of 
our perceptions of life and character and of 
our own work. But in such a crisis let us 
not mistake. What are we to do? We are 
not to throw away our faith with our illu- 
sions, and fold our hands in despair, and cry 
out that all is false; but we are to remember 
that because, when we are children, we see 
as children, and understand as children, for 
that very reason when we come to man- 
hood and womanhood, we are to put away 
childish things. We are to accept, in other 
words, the trial, the probation, of half-knowl- 
edge ; and then we are to recognize that the 
shattering of our earlier illusions is but a step- 
ping-stone first to a nobler and truer vision 
of service, and so to a loftier ideal of ex- 



81 

cellence in the doing of it. And just here 
let me again commend to your attention the 
story of Sister Dora. There are some lives 
of women who have given themselves to 
Christ and His service which have the more 
value just because they do not carefully ex- 
clude from their pages any honest delinea- 
tion of those infirmities of character, which 
form a considerable part of the noblest 
natures. And, in the case of Dora Pat- 
terson, the power and the helpfulness — I 
speak at any rate for myself — of that book 
has largely been that it is a story of a woman 
of infirmities of character, with a hasty 
temper, with an intense love of power, with 
a very strong hunger for admiration for 
which confessedly again and again she did 
things, who, nevertheless, in the midst of 
this dross mixed with the gold, carried all 
the way so high a purpose, ending a noble 
life at last so sweetly and serenely under the 
discipline of pain, that to have known her, 
environed by her infirmities, and yet master- 
ing them at last, is infinitely more helpful 
and inspiring than to have seen her in that 
half-light and mediaeval coloring which 
would have made of her a saint and not a 
woman. 
No, we are to remember that the things 



82 

that are earthly must needs partake of the 
earth. We long, oftentimes, for an example, 
a leader, a personal friend and companion, 
who shall be so free from human infirmi- 
ties that nowhere, at any point, is there any- 
thing to shatter our illusion and discourage 
our idolatry. It is just here that we must 
distinguish between an illusion and an ideal. 
There is an ideal excellence, but it is an 
ideal excellence just because, under the 
conditions in which you and I live and 
work to-day, it must of necessity be im- 
possible for it to be a merely human ex- 
cellence. We would fain bring our ideals 
down here into the work-day world, and 
make them a part of our common life, and 
get our inspiration by that sense of touch 
and sight and hearing, which comes from 
holding on to the hand of an earthly friend. 
Do you not realize that the moment you 
bring them down into this work-day 
world, they must needs partake of its in- 
firmities and shortcomings, and that, just 
in so far as they are merely human, they 
must live and err under merely human con- 
ditions ? 

No! The longing in itself is right and 
noble, but it is given to lift our hearts, no 
matter by what painful struggle, from 



83 

earthly idols to the One Ideal that can never 
fail, and will never disappoint us. 

And what is this but to state in other lan- 
guage that which Jesus Himself stated on the 
morning of the Resurrection when she who 
had known Him in the flesh, and longed to 
cling to Him as her ideal in the flesh, came 
and flung herself upon His feet, to be bidden 
back with those lofty words : " Touch Me 
not, for I am not yet ascended to My 
Father." She was to touch Him again, not 
with the hand of flesh, but with the hand 
of faith, and so she was, by that upper life 
lifted far above her own, to be drawn out of 
this lower life, to let go the illusions of her 
ignorant past, and to see in them the proph- 
ecy of that Divine Ideal, which was to be 
hereafter her highest inspiration and her 
truest strength. Remember just here those 
words in the Collect for Ascension-Day: 
" Grant, we beseech Thee, Almighty God, 
that like as we do believe Thy only begotten 
Son our Lord Jesus Christ to have ascended 
into the Heavens ; so we may also in heart 
and mind thither ascend, and with Him 
continually dwell." You have lost your 
earlier illusions. Do not bemoan them. Step 
by step, as you have gone on in your work, 
one and another of those earlier faiths in your 



84 

work, in your opportunities, in yourself, in 
your fellows, it may be, have been shattered 
and crumbled. Eemember that all these 
fragments, these broken lights of virtue of 
which you get a glimpse here in one char- 
acter and there in another, but which are 
united in perfect symmetry and complete- 
ness in no human life — that these exist in 
order that you may lift your aspirations above 
them to that Ideal Excellence that once 
walked the earth awhile, incarnated in Jesus 
Christ, risen and ascended now to His 
Father and your Father, who is in Heaven, 
and real to you to-day, only as you " thither 
ascend in mind and in heart, and with Him 
continually dwell." And so, let these van- 
ishing images of our earlier illusions be not 
the discouragements to an earnest service, 
but the ladder by which we climb up to it. 
Out of the ignorance, out of the misappre- 
hensions of your past, try to come a little 
closer to Him, who is the one perfect Ideal 
of excellence — Jesus Christ. 

When she was ministering at Walsall in 
a hospital, one day, a poor miner over whom 
she bent, said to Dora Patterson, " I want, 
Sister Dora, to make a confession to you." 
"Make it then," she said, with her impe- 
rious abruptness, ''make it." Even then, 



as she bent above him, her head was bound 
up because of a wound she had received 
from a stone thrown by some unseen hand, 
when returning from a visit among the 
poor. "I was the man," he said, " who 
threw that stone; I cannot endure not to 
tell you of it, when I see you ministering 
thus tenderly to me." " My dear fellow," 
she said, " don't you suppose I knew it? I 
have long ago gotten over my earlier illu- 
sion that the poor always love their helpers. 
God forbid that I should not serve you, be- 
cause it has been shattered." 

And so with you and me. God forbid 
that we should not serve Him in the image 
of any of His creatures, because our illu- 
sions have been shattered ! Out of these 
vanishing dreams of the past, let us rather 
come closer into the presence of the One 
Excellence, and find it in our perfect, our 
sufficient Ideal. 



* 



tot)0lene00. 



An Address delivered in St. George's Church, 
New York, Monday, March 15, 1886, at the Service 
for Women engaged in Church work. 



WHOLENESS. 



In concluding the series of services of 
which this is the last, I shall depart from 
my usage hitherto on occasions like this, 
and say little, if anything, of your work. 
I want this morning to speak to you of 
yourselves, and in the sequence of the 
thought suggested by the last theme that 
occupied our attention, to speak to you of 
yourselves as instruments to be used for the 
work of God in the world. Indeed, I think 
that if you will reflect a moment, you will 
recognize how little is any such conception 
of our work as is expressed by the word 
" wholeness " possible to us here and to-day. 

" Wholeness " — what do we mean by the 
word? Certainly we mean something that 
is unlike f ragmen tar iness or partialness ; 
and yet, what view of our work is possible 
to us without recognizing the characteristic 
of fragmentariness ? Take for example, the 
work which the Church is doing in a great 
city like this. We may well, in this inspir- 



90 

ing presence, take note of that which is 
being done here, where an old, and so to 
speak, largely disused shell has been made, 
under a new touch, to be filled with life 
and potent with influences for good to a de- 
gree for which we are all equally glad and 
thankful. How manifold it is in its activi- 
ties ! How untiring the zeal and energy of 
him to whose hospitality we are indebted 
for our service this morning, and of those 
associated with him ! And yet the first 
thing the rector of this church would say 
to you, if standing in my place, would be, 
after all, to own that any such work as this, 
large and many-sided as it is, with reference 
to the needs of a community so vast as 
ours, can only be fragmentary and partial. 
Think of the twelve or thirteen hundred 
thousand people who live in New York, and 
then consider how imperfectly at best, the 
Church, whose children we are, can reach 
and rescue them. We must content our- 
selves—it is a part of the condition of things 
under which we are working — to do our 
little segment of work, to do it with all our 
hearts, and then to confess that it is but 
fragmentary after all. 

On the other hand, when we come to turn 
from the work we are doing to the workers, 



91 

what is it, which, as we read the New Testa- 
ment in the record of those marvellous re- 
creations of power and restorations of faculty 
which are characteristic of the miracles of 
Christ, is more clearly indicated than this, 
that howsoever fragmentary our work may 
be, we ourselves were not meant to. be frag- 
ments, but each one of us a whole? 

It is just here that the Christian religion, 
standing over against ancient art, has so 
large a significance. You remember those 
figures of wouien called caryatides, which 
are a frequent feature of antique archi- 
tecture, and which are introduced often in 
connection with some vast facade instead of 
columns, to support entablatures. That was 
the conception of art, because, first of all, 
it was the conception of pagan humanity. 
There was a widely-prevailing view of 
human beings which regarded them as no 
more nor better than beasts of burden, use- 
ful so far as they had a pair of strong 
shoulders, and under certain pressure could 
stand up and resist and bear,and that was all. 
But the moment we come into the presence 
of Christ and the work He does in the 
world, we see how entirely His conception of 
human nature contradicts that ; how from 
the beginning to the end of His earthly min- 



92 

istry, where there is inrperfectness, where 
there is absence of faculty, where there is 
primitive denial of power, as in the blind 
man's case, or in the case of the deaf and 
dumb, He restores it. Surely in the case 
of such restorations, there is enormous 
significance in that side of them which 
reveals Christ's work as making human 
nature whole and human powers sym- 
metrical, as denying the doctrine that a 
man or woman is to be content with certain 
partial powers, leaving others equally un- 
developed and barren. We have a phrase 
when we speak of people who are incom- 
plete, which, just here, is most expressive. 
Here is some one full of zeal and energy in 
his calling, absorbed in his daily business 
with an ardor so keen that nothing can dis- 
courage it. How the man holds on to one 
purpose, and pushes himself and all his 
powers in one direction ! But touch him on 
the side of humanity, appeal to those in- 
stincts which ought to be in him to love his 
fellow-man, or try and kindle in him some 
noble aspiration for a life above the seen, 
and you knock at a door which is closed. 
Now, I say, we have a phrase in regard to 
such people which is singularly descriptive. 
We say of a man like that, " he is but half 



93 

a man," something in bim has been left out. 
That which makes completeness, that which 
makes symmetry in character, is wanting ; 
and in describing one thus as half a man, 
we describe him truly. 

I. And so it belongs to us, in connection 
with the topic I have suggested for our 
reflection, to ask ourselves what that is in 
personal character which makes what we 
call wholeness or completeness. And in 
undertaking to answer that question this 
morning, I shall not disdain to begin very 
low down. When I touch your hand, when 
I hear the sound of your voice, I come in 
contact, in the one case or the other, with 
something which is the only means which 
you have of translating to me that which is 
in your thought. In other words, it is 
through those physical powers and endow- 
ments which God has given to us, that we 
make ourselves intelligible to other people. 
Shut them all up, and one might be a genius 
in his intellectual gifts, but would be pow- 
erless to influence his fellow men. It is 
through this wonderful organism which in- 
cludes the senses and the sense powers, that 
the intellect and the spirit of man reveals 
itself to its brother man, and it is the vigor 
and wholeness of this physical organization 



94 

which alone makes greatly possible the er- 
rands and the services of mercy on which 
GocLcalls us to run. 

What now is just here the danger 
especially" of the sex to which I speak this 
morning? I think it is a twofold danger, 
and, as such, almost universal. On the one 
hand, if a woman at the outset of life has 
natural gifts and charms, that perilous 
endowment which we call beauty, then 
there is a strong temptation to minister to 
the physical side of her nature, not merely 
to pamper herself by indulgence, but to 
consider those things that contribute to the 
adornment of the body, and relate to the 
mere flesh and what may be called mere 
fleshly potency. There is something appal- 
ling, when one remembers the errands to be 
done in the world by woman, in the thought 
of the time that some women spend on 
something no better than the beautification 
of their persoDS, letting the mere decoration 
of the body engross so large a thought and 
absorb so much of their time, that when the 
day is done, and the neglected duty that 
called them at the beginning of it stands over 
against them with admonitory mien, they are 
constrained to remember that they have 
failed because of some prettiness of toilet 



95 

trifling, or some thoughtless folly, which 
ate into the purpose and finally ate up the 
day. 

And then again, on the other hand, there 
is that other danger, and there is urgent 
reason for speaking of it, which comes to 
women exempt from the temptation to 
which I have already referred, who, be- 
cause they may not be richly endowed with 
physical gifts, despise the care of the 
body. We ought surely to be emancipated 
in this century, after the dark pages in 
the Church's history which are behind us, 
from the follies, which, in the name of 
Eeligion, men and women have committed 
in the neglect and torture of their own 
bodies ; and equally emancipated from the 
folly of supposing that godliness consists in 
debility or dyspepsia. Is it not a mechan- 
ism of God's own handiwork that we are 
neglecting ? It is a cruel wrong to a gift of 
God, no less sacred than the gift of the 
intellect, even though not so high in its 
powers, if we abuse the body He has given 
us, by disesteeming its soundness or neglect- 
ing its welfare, when, by a simple care for the 
rudimentary principles of health, we might 
keep this physical instrument, whose powers 
for ministering are in proportion as it is in 



a healthy condition, well- tuned. The world 
is cursed all around to-day, just because 
men and women have been neglectful and 
indifferent in the care of their physical 
health. How the home has had its peace 
shattered and the day spoiled by some mean 
and bitter word— the fruit of some vicious 
heart or brain? No, bat of some detestable 
mal-condition of the body, which could be 
cured if we would only recognize the 
sacredness of the instrument God put in our 
power for His service. 

Surely, between the two extremes of 
idolatry of the body and neglect of the 
body, there is a golden mean. It is possible 
not to make an idol of the body, but a com- 
plete instrument of service, to develop that 
lowest side of you if you please, but even so 
to make yourself more and more a whole 
woman by the way in which you respect 
the laws of health, and thus to reverence 
that which was made to be the temple of 
the Holy Ghost. 

II. But again, you have an instrument 
infinitely finer than the body. There is 
something in you, that, as in old Latin 
phrase, says, intelligo : I know, I perceive, 
I understand. There is something in you 
that forever differentiates you from all the 



97 

orders of beings below you, however men 
may try to make them like you by their 
training, and which only shows more and 
more that you are not a brute. Each one of 
you, if she has used her own mind even in 
the most imperfect way, has become con- 
scious of this threefold fact : First of all, 
that she has powers of perception. The 
mind recognizes truth, discerns a fact; there 
is something in it which, like the hand, is 
prehensile, and that takes hold of that which 
appeals to its reason and its intelligence. 

Next in order is that power of the mind 
which we call the power of comparison. 
The child begins to exercise it by a subtle 
intuition, as soon as it begins to think at all, 
and just as an infant learns the difference 
between great and small, so as we go on we 
are meant to learn, by the exercise of this 
power of comparison, the distinction be- 
tween great and little things, and also the 
distinction between things that are true and 
the things that are false. 

And then, binding these other two powers, 
the perceptive and the comparative, together, 
there is what we call the reflective power, 
which, alas ! in this age of ours, is the least 
exercised of all; the power, which wants to 
be disciplined, and developed, and which, 



98 

in connection with the highest themes, bids 
us away out of the hurried throughfares 
of life, to be still, and sit for a little while 
with the busy hands and feet in perfect re- 
pose. This is our mind. The power that 
perceives, the power that compares, and the 
reflective power that crowns them all with 
the act of meditation, and so seeks, as 
Bacon says, to know a thing by " thinking 
through it "—the highest dignity I can con- 
ceive of the intellectual nature. 

Now what is the characteristic of the age 
in which we live, as regards its mental atti- 
tude? It is an age of very slender and 
shifting beliefs, an age in which the opinions 
of yesterday in no individual case, as a rule, 
are sure to be the opinions of to-morrow. It 
is an age in which we are wont to find peo- 
ple moved out of their old moorings, and 
there are more people, I believe, than con- 
fess it even into the ears of their most inti- 
mate friends, who have been moved away 
from all positive beliefs whatever. But if 
this is so, I charge such a condition of things, 
wherever it is found, quite as largely as 
upon any other mfluenie, upon the influence 
of what I would call mtellectual laziness, a 
curse, I think of our feneration, greater in 
proportion than in any that has preceded it, 



99 

certainly for two hundred years. We turn 
back and think of our fathers and of the 
narrowness of their faith ; yes, it may have 
been narrow, but what a hold they had upon 
the truth they believed, what a power it 
was in their daily life, just because they had 
gotten that strong grip upon it, which 
conies, and can only come, from the exercise 
of the threefold intellectual power, which 
God has given to every one of us. 

How many of us now, in this generation, 
can say that our beliefs are matters of strong 
conviction, that our opinions, whether in 
regard to letters, or art, or religion, are 
things which we have reached by " think- 
ing unto them " ? Rather, how many of us 
have accepted these things by tradition? Un- 
doubtedly, we may not disesteem traditions, 
but the degradation of our intellectual con-, 
dition in the nineteenth century, as I re- 
gard it, is this, that the traditions on whose 
authority we hold things, are so often so 
contemptible as compared with the tradi- 
tions that bound our ancestors. Though it 
is true that many of them were only crea- 
tures of traditions, their traditions had the 
dignity of antiquity, and came trailing down 
through the glory of past ages, ennobled as 
being the beliefs and opinions of men and 



100 

women who had suffered and died for their 
faith. 

But ours — where did we get thern, and 
how noble and how saintly, and how worthy 
of the position of leadership, have been the 
men and women in their thought and lives 
from whom we often derive them? Believe 
me, we could do no better service to our own 
souls than over against this one word, whole- 
ness, to strive for intellectual completeness, 
to ask, on what grounds do I hold truth? 
and to seek to discipline and call into action 
the power in us that thinks, and so develop 
a more clear understanding, whether of the 
truths of nature or of revelation, by the ex- 
ercise of the powers God has given us, 
wherewith to take hold of them. 

III. And then, finally, wholeness means 
supremely the exercise and the develop- 
ment of the spiritual faculty, or what I 
would call, as the Bishop of Central New 
York, in a very remarkable sermon, which 
I would that I might put in the hands of 
every one of you, described, some years 
ago, as the " Faith Faculty." 

In the Gospel according to St. Luke, 
there is a description of the healing of the 
ten lepers by Christ, and the return of one 
of them, after he had been healed, to pay 



101 

homage to his Healer. In that case, when 
Christ has cleansed the lepers, He bids them 
go show themselves to the priest and ren- 
der the offering Moses has commanded. 
And then we read that " one of them, 
when he saw that he was healed, turned 
back, and with a loud voice glorified God. 

" And fell down on his face at His feet, 
giving Him thanks : and he was a Samari- 
tan. 

"And Jesus answering said, Were there 
not ten cleansed? but where are the nine? 

"There are not found that returned to 
give glory to God, save this stranger. 

"And He said unto him, Arise, go thy 
way: thy faith hath made thee whole." 

Whole — a profoundly significant word 
just here. The others had done w T hat He 
bade them do, and they might have replied 
in answer to Christ's criticism, that He 
Himself had told them to go and show 
themselves to the priest, though He had 
not indeed forbade them to thank Him. 
But the significance of His word to this one 
Samaritan lies, if I read it aright, in this, 
that while the others had got what they 
wanted and gone away in the joy of it — 
as so many of us do when we get what we 
want, forgetting the Giver in the gift — this 



102 

one turned back to Christ, to pour out his 
heart in gratitude to God. And then what 
happened ? 

Have you ever asked yourselves that ques- 
tion ? Ah ! I think it was, that, as he looked 
up into that Divine countenance and heard 
the tones of that incomparable voice, there 
smote upon his soul for the first time the 
Vision of the Divine ! Into his heart there 
broke at last the sense of God, and so he 
flings himself at Jesus' feet — in gratitude ? 
Yes, but most of all in adoration. And that 
therefore is what Christ meant by saying 
his faith had made him whole. He was a 
clean man before, cleansed of his leprosy, 
but when at last there woke in his breast 
that consciousness of the Divine, when at 
last he saw his Lord and owned Him, when 
the Faith Faculty, in other words, was born 
out of impotence into life, then, he became 
a whole man ; not a half a man, with his 
physical powers and his intellectual powers- 
alive, but dead on the God ward side, but a 
whole man at last, because his "faith had 
made him whole." 

Blessed be God for such a word as that to 
us who are here to-day. It is not wholly an 
age of indifference in which you and I live, 
it is not an age of want of reading or cul~ 



103 

ture, or want of talk about religious things 
— I sometimes think there is too much of 
this in the pulpit and out of it — but it is an 
age of unfaith, because, while we live so 
largely upon traditions — whether of the 
neighbor who lives next door or the prophet 
who spoke a hundred years ago, it doesn't 
make the least difference — what we believe 
and affirm is second-hand ; and the Faith 
Faculty is a thing to a great many people, 
so far as its loftiest exercise is concerned, 
all but unknown. 

We believe " the belief "-—the Creed. Is 
not that faith ? we ask. Rather I maintain, 
faith is vision, the unsealing of the spiritual 
eye-sight, that power in you and me which 
turns the dome of brass into the open door of 
Heaven, and which makes us to behold here 
in this work-a-day world the form of Him 
who walks among the golden candlesticks, 
and bends above all His workers with inex- 
haustible sympathy and love. 

That is the faculty which in this age we 
need most of all to have awakened, and in 
what may be called a caricature of it in our 
time, I seem to see a kind of protestantism 
of faith, which may well be of significance 
to you and me. We are many of us much 
pained by the extravagance of that religious 



104 

phase of the hour, which concerns itself 
with what are called Faith Cures, and God 
knows nobody has less disposition to dis- 
esteem human agencies in connection with 
the work of healing than I, or to recognize 
the fact that in God's work to-day for sick- 
ness and misery in the world, He expects 
His children, their hands and eyes and feet 
and minds, to be, with other natural gifts, 
instruments of working His cures among 
men. But when, in accordance with the 
spirit of an age that believes so much in the 
seen and so little in the unseen, men exalt 
physical remedies into the place of the 
Divine Providence, when they disesteeni 
prayer so largely in the case of sickness and 
suffering as to disregard it altogether, when 
it is hard in so many cases, to get people, in 
connection with the miseries of this life, to 
place their dependence on the help and love 
of a Heavenly Father, I don't wonder that 
there rises up a sect, if you choose to call it 
so, which, with its inevitable reaction against 
this state of things, believes in being cured 
solely by the exercise of faith. It is a mod- 
ern phase of Protestantism, which has its 
profound significance and which we may 
not disregard. 

For, all the way along, work as we will, 



105 

command as we may the skill of the ablest 
physician, what we do from beginning to 
end is conditioned upon what God does. 
And so, whether we are ministering to the 
body or the soul, whether our work lies 
among ill-ventilated homes, or in the midst 
of ignorance and prejudice and rebellion 
against the law of God, let us remember 
that the thing which is to make you com- 
plete women, not fragments, but whole for 
Christ and His service, is most of all the 
Faith Faculty, that sees your Lord, that 
hears His voice, and that holds His hand. 
Says the Apostle, "Ye are complete in 
Him." Expressive word ! This is the whole 
womanhood that we want. 

In taking leave of you, with thankfulness 
for the privilege of having met you for these 
past few months, I could offer no better 
prayer for you or the work you are doing 
for your Master, than that, in that work, 
you may each one of you illustrate a whole 
womanhood, rounded and complete and 
symmetrical, healthy in body, acute and 
vigorous in mind, but above all, upward- 
looking and expectant in Faith, trusting in 
the Leader who leads you, confident, because 
of the strength which He alone can give. 

May He go with you as we part to-day. 



106 

May He follow you in all the ministries 
and services that wait before you, and so 
make each one of you complete in Him, 
"Who is the head of all principality and 
power." 



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